Flat Shadows

Flat Shadows is a production-ready impementation of a classic real-time rendering technique that projects 3D-object geometry onto a flat surface.

Targeted for stylized games—especially projects that intentionally aim for a retro or old-school visual style.

✅ Features:

- Always sharp, crisp shadows with no blur, aliasing, hard edge holes, peter-panning, shadow acne, or cascade seams.

- Handles common implementation challenges such as proper culling, vertex deformation, and alpha clipping.

- Two shadow color modes: physically-inspired lighting approximation or simple artistic control.

- Supports freely oriented floor planes.

- Supports multiple directional lights.

- Several setup options for balancing simplicity and performance.

- Works alongside Unity’s built-in shadow system.

- No dependecies from other assets.

- Demo scene and complete user guide included.

⚠️ Considerations:

- This is not a replacement for traditional shadow mapping. By design, these shadows are only suitable for relatively flat environments with minimal height variation.

- This technique is bandwidth-friendly and can improve performance on tile-based GPUs. However, on platforms where toggling shadow maps or depth textures don't cause significant FPS drops, the performance boost is unlikely to be noticeable.

❌ Limitations:

- Only directional lights

- No stereo rendering support (XR / VR)